SelfReg-UNet: Self-Regularized UNet for Medical Image Segmentation

Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Peijie Qiu, Mohammad Farazi, Aristeidis Sotiras, Abolfazl Razi, Yalin Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Since its introduction, UNet has been leading a variety of medical image segmentation tasks. Although numerous follow-up studies have also been dedicated to improving the performance of standard UNet, few have conducted in-depth analyses of the underlying interest pattern of UNet in medical image segmentation. In this paper, we explore the patterns learned in a UNet and observe two important factors that potentially affect its performance: (i) irrelative feature learned caused by asymmetric supervision; (ii) feature redundancy in the feature map. To this end, we propose to balance the supervision between encoder and decoder and reduce the redundant information in the UNet. Specifically, we use the feature map that contains the most semantic information (i.e., the last layer of the decoder) to provide additional supervision to other blocks to provide additional supervision and reduce feature redundancy by leveraging feature distillation. The proposed method can be easily integrated into existing UNet architecture in a plug-and-play fashion with negligible computational cost. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of standard UNets on four medical image segmentation datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/ChongQingNoSubway/SelfReg-UNet.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2024 - 27th International Conference, Proceedings
EditorsMarius George Linguraru, Qi Dou, Aasa Feragen, Stamatia Giannarou, Ben Glocker, Karim Lekadir, Julia A. Schnabel
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages601-611
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9783031721106
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024 - Marrakesh, Morocco
Duration: Oct 6 2024Oct 10 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15008 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2024
Country/TerritoryMorocco
CityMarrakesh
Period10/6/2410/10/24

Keywords

  • Image Segmentation
  • Interpretability analysis
  • UNet

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